Sunday 23 December 2012 17.00 EST
First published on Sunday 23 December 2012 17.00 EST

So – as you will be aware if you have been shopping or listened to a radio station in the past couple of weeks – this is Christmas. And if Christmas is about anything, it is about fat men dancing; in night clubs, at the office party, but most of all at the World Darts Championship.

Of course, not all the participants are total chubsters (a term I feel liberated to use in the delightfully retro context of the darts) but quite a few do look more corpulent than ever this year. This could be down to the continued commercial success of professional darts enabling more hot dinners, but I think it's a consequence of the introduction to the championships of what I can only describe as dancing girls.

These lissom young performers are a new addition to the pre-match buildup. They wear short shorts and bikini tops, and gyrate their exposed mid-portions on what looks to be a fast-spin cycle as the players progress to the stage, escorted by yet more pulchritudinous young women. If it's true that the portly can appear more trim simply by hanging around with the even-better fed, then what we are seeing is the reverse effect. Placing an Adrian Lewis or a Phil Taylor next to so much lithe glamour is never going to show the boys off to their best advantage.

There is, of course, a Sid-shaped hole at the centre of the world championship this year. The players now compete for the Sid Waddell Trophy, an appropriate tribute to the late broadcaster, but one that somehow serves to emphasise his absence. When organisers considered how to maintain the competition's appeal in a Sid-less world, someone evidently came up with the answer, "More birds", as these performers would undoubtedly be called.

Frankly, they needn't have bothered because the tournament, televised exhaustively on Sky Sports over the festive season, remains brilliant television. There is never a shortage of colourful stuff to point the camera at; Colin "Jaws" Lloyd, for instance, quite light on his feet for a big man, and with a highly entertaining dad dance to his "Is it a Monster?" walk-on music. He does a little mock march, then an outstretched-arm aeroplane move, before jogging to the front of the stage and grinning shyly at the audience.

He beat Mark "Spider" Webster fairly comfortably, and celebrated by jumping up and down and punching the air, testing not just the sturdiness of the stage but the very foundations of the Alexandra Palace. These guys hold nothing back in the post-match interviews either, re-living every missed double, keenly aware of turning points in the match. "I went 3-0 up, and I thought I shouldn't be 3-0 up here, but Lloydy you've got to take it," Jaws told commentator Stuart Pyke after his win, "Then he came back at me and I have to say my backside began to flap a bit," an image which is going to be a tough one to shake off.

I like the fact that the players often appear as a pair after the match, victor and vanquished, rehearsing the game from opposite standpoints, and mostly showing what I believe the young people call maximum respect for each other. Clearly, the success of darts I alluded to earlier means the guys are now more or less a travelling circus, rather like the ATP tour in tennis, and while you would expect some not to get on, there often seems to be a lot of love between darters in the post-match interviews.

Paul Nicholson, beaten by Robert Thornton in a sudden-death leg after what, if I were in Sky's commentary box, I would undoubtedly call a terrific tungsten tussle, was typically gracious in defeat. "All I wanted was to enter this tournament with dignity and leave with dignity," he said, although how much dignity there is in performing before a crowd of beery geezers dressed variously as superheroes, the Village People, and Marcel Marceau, holding up placards with scrawled on messages, among them the legend "I love custard", is open to question. "Just give me one shot," Nicholson said, "That's my mantra."

You tend to think of darts players having lagers rather than mantras but that is to do them an injustice. Amid all the dancers, the silly walk-ons, the daft crowd, these chaps are doing something that is very difficult to do, under immense pressure. And obviously they take it seriously but they do not take themselves seriously and that is half the joy of darts.

The couple of weeks at Ally Pally is, in my view, the most reliably entertaining sport on TV.

Now all we have to do is get through three days of Christmas and we are into the final rounds. As the great poet Sir Nodward Holder says this time every year, "Look to the future now, it's only just begun".